The bets are off, it looks like Intel is in for a price-performance shock with AMD's Bulldozer, after all. In the press deck of AMD FX Processor series leaked by DonanimHaber ahead of its launch, AMD claims huge performance leads over Intel. To sum it up, AMD claims that its AMD FX 8150 processor is looking Intel's Core i7-980X in the eye in game tests, even edging past it in some DirectX 11 titles.

It is performing on par with the Core i7-2600K in several popular CPU benchmarks such as WinRAR 4, X.264 pass 2, Handbrake, 7Zip, POV Ray 3.7, ABBYY OCR, wPrime 32M, and Bibble 5.0. AMD FX 8150 is claimed to be genuinely benefiting from the FMA4 instruction set that Sandy Bridge lacks, in the OCL Performance Mandelbrot test, the FX 8150 outperforms the i7-2600K by as much as 70%. Lastly, the pricing of the FX 8150 is confirmed to be around the $250 mark. Given this, and the fact that the Core i7-2600K is priced about $70 higher, Intel is in for a price-performance shock.